Cap'n Crunch - Relation To Hacking Culture

Relation To Hacking Culture

In early 1971, a former Air Force electronics technician named John Draper (later self-nicknamed Captain Crunch, Crunch, Crunchman, or Mr. Crunchtastic) was informed by his phone phreak friend Joe Engressia that a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of the cereal could be easily modified to emit a tone at precisely 2600 Hertz, the same frequency that was used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready to route a new call. This would effectively disconnect one end of the trunk, allowing the still-connected side to enter an operator mode. This resulted in, among other things, the ability to place free phone calls to anywhere in the world and operator-like control over the phone system. Experimenting with this whistle inspired Draper to build blue boxes, electronic devices capable of reproducing this 2600 Hz tone and other tones required to control trunk lines. After being featured, under his pseudonym of Captain Crunch, in an article in the October 1971 issue of Esquire Magazine titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box", he was sentenced in 1972 to five years’ probation for toll fraud.

Read more about this topic:  Cap'n Crunch

Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, hacking and/or culture:

    The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be ‘observed’ are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
    [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.
    —Ian Hacking (b. 1936)

    The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you’d never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1953)